It seems the 50501 movement is facing some predictable problems on commercial platforms.
On Reddit, the 50501 subreddit has temporarily shut down over abuse. This comes after reports from users that the community is “obviously being astroturfed”. No word as to when it will be back online.
It seems things are not much better over at Facebook, where there is apparently frequent calls to stop protesting this and that, with a Reddit user commenting that the group “feels like it’s imploding”.
This is hardly surprising given how commercial social media has repeatedly shown itself to be easily manipulated, but it’s still fascinating that it’s bad enough to shut down the whole Reddit community. Although we are certainly in a better place over here we are not immune: Make sure to be vigilant and to report suspicious activity.
If anyone is on Facebook, maybe now is a good time to give people there a few pointers towards Lemmy/PieFed.
You can feel that peaceful protests are useless, but trying to convince other people of that perspective isn’t in the scope of this community. We are exclusively peaceful, so if you want more “direct action,” consider looking up a different group, such as Antifa or Anonymous. Violence will never be tolerated in 50501.
Sorry, but any protest is a collective. 50501 or any other banner doesn’t have exclusive rights to a movement. It will naturally go wherever it needs to, with or without the 50501 moniker